nebris | Entries tagged with global financial trainwreck of 2007-2012

More and more I get badly depressed after I read my news feed. First though, I get Really Fuckin' Angry. The depression comes after when I realize I cannot say out loud what I want to say because I'd get banned from whatever social media platform and possibly even 'investigated for terrorist threats'.

However, without getting specific, what I still can say [so far] is that I desire terrible and ugly things to happen to The Owners, to their operatives, sycophants and political stooges, hell, even to their families, as well...as terrible and ugly as possible.

But not all this comes from my 'bottomless rage'. It also comes from my awareness that without the real fear of 'terrible and ugly' consequences, The Owners, their operatives, sycophants and political stooges will continue to rape all of the rest of us in any manner that suits them and their vested interests.

Current Mood: enraged

Feb. 19th, 2017 at 2:22 AM

~I keep reading endless numbers of articles and essays about how Trump became president. And none of the them really seem to get it. Chris Hughes comes close, but he seems to have lost his mind. Can't blame him really, as everyone is dancing around the elephant in the room; we are in fact already IN Collapse, eg, The System is in Terminal Failure.

We are in Late Stage Capitalism. What that means is as the profit margins get narrower, The Owners need to squeeze harder to extract said profits. This has been going for a few decades now, but for the general public, the 'balloon went up' with the Crash of '09, which was the direct result of The Big Squeeze. Wall Street et al created a Housing Bubble of insane proportions via all manner of shady and even illegal marketing and accounting games.

When the shit hit the fan, they got their political lackeys to use Tax Payer Money to 'reimburse' them for their loses and left said Tax Payers out to dry. Roughly 40% of the American Middle Class Wealth was lost. FORTY PERCENT. That meant eroded tax bases, gutted pension funds, wrecked state and municipal bond portfolios.

That is what Obama inherited. And, being the Corporatist he is, he bunted economically. The perfect example is the ACA [which originated with The Heritage Foundation, a very right wing think tank]. He'd promised a Public Option over and over and over again on the campaign trail. Withing a month of his Inauguration, it had vanished, forcing thirty million Americans into the clutches of the Insurance Industry. [see The Big Squeeze]

Eight years later, after more and more of that kind of betrayal from the Democrats and the insane slavering obstructionism of the GOP, the American Electorate had come to hate the establishments of both parties. And two Insurgent candidates emerged from outside of each party; Bernie and The Donald.

We all know what happened. The 'undisciplined' Dems suddenly became Very Disciplined and sandbagged Bernie. And the infamously disciplined GOP fielded a slate of total buffoons and got its clock cleaned.

Even then, Hillary should have won. She did in fact 'win' The Vote. But her ground game sucked so badly [arrogance], and the Dems had alienated so much of their own base [more arrogance], she lost four states by roughly 120K votes in total.

And that boys and girls, is how Collapse works. The System becomes so rotten that a Black Swan like The Donald can end up in the White House. [EDIT: 5/5/22 At this point I made some noise about 'The Deep State gaming The System in order to fix the problem and do a reset' but they turned out to be fuckin' gutless and did fuck all, while The Owners, those traitorous scum, got their $1.4 trillion and so didn't give a fuck]

But we are still in Late Stage Capitalism and Collapse is still underway and no one has any real idea what to do about that ...except, of course, More Of The Same, which is a well known definition of insanity.

Toss the now inevitable Catastrophic Climate Change into the mix and one can be certain that the next century or so is going to be 'very interesting times' indeed.

You can kill yourself now if you wish....

Current Mood: angry

Ok, had some coffee now...lol

I started to study history, most especially Military History, when I was nine years old. [I'll be seventy this year] When I was seventeen I was out in the streets demonstrating against the Vietnam War. Organized students at my high school and we confronted the police, violently. [made for great post-demo sex lol]

The single Great Sociopolitical Lesson I learned with that was how classic National Socialist crowd control techniques worked seamlessly on Leftist art students. [I went to the old High School of Art & Design in NYC] With proper technique, The Herd is easily guided and controlled no matter how intelligent its individual members may be...and most people ain't that bright.

Many of us, myself included for a while, truly believed 'The Revolution was at hand'. What we got instead was Nixon, Reagan and finally Trump, plus Corporatist Apparatchiks like Clinton, Obama...and ofc Joe Biden. [Goddess Bless Jimmy Carter tho, he has remained a Good Man] And nearly all my Old Comrades became Capitalist Roaders, aka 'Yuppies'.

I was never a Communist, tho I used some of their rhetoric. Even as a teen it was easy to see that Stalin and Mao were homicidal psychopaths, that no Russian or Chinese workers 'owned the means of production' and the so-called 'communist states' were really Authoritarian State Capitalist.

Democracy works fine in small polities, maybe no more than five or ten thousand people. That is the maximum most Baseline Humans can handle. Beyond that, all the institutional mechanisms required to run a Modern Technological State outstrip the Baseline Human capacity to keep track them. After that, running things gets 'farmed out' and that's where Corruption starts to kick in. Once we get to millions of people, it is endemic and Democracy is more and more subsumed until we get to our present state, the Inverted Totalitarianism you so blithely dismissed.

Baseline Humans [me, thee and all we know] simply cannot make Mass Democracy work. Just look at how most of us deal with Accelerating Climate Change, which is likely to kill most if not all of us. Denial...Denial...Denial...Extinction.

That, more than anything else, led me to become a Transhumanist. Unfortunately, it is almost certain that The Rich and Powerful will be the main beneficiaries of the Genetic Engineering and Cybernetic Augmentation technologies that are being developed in this very moment. But maybe a workable form of Democracy will come out of these New Humans having a Cybernetic form of Telepathy where one can download all the information required directly into one's mind.

Of course, I have little doubt that a Genetically Engineered 'laboring class' of 'less than humans' will be created to serve these New Humans, controlled by brain implants and 'made happy with their lot'. We love having servants.

Because of our failure to deal with Accelerating Climate Change, these New Humans will have to live underground and in orbit for a while, centuries I expect. But I'm sure they'll adapt just fine. They'll still be 'humans' and we're like f'ing cockroaches. lol

Me, I live out in the desert with my 2nd wife and our many cats, which worked out quite nicely in The Time of Covid [a symptom of Accelerating Climate Change BTW]. I write and think and pass the time until I pass onto the next Turn of The Wheel.

You see, I'm [mostly] at the Acceptance Stage of Grief, while you seem to be somewhere in the Anger/Bargaining Stages. /sigh I suppose that's in part a function of age...

...and that's just about that.

See here: https://nebris.tumblr.com/post/677383159172792320

Current Mood: amused

~I keep reading endless numbers of articles and essays about how Trump became president. And none of the them really seem to get it. Chris Hughes comes close, but he seems to have lost his mind. Can't blame him really, as everyone is dancing around the elephant in the room; we are in fact already IN Collapse, eg, The System is in Terminal Failure.

We are in Late Stage Capitalism. What that means is as the profit margins get narrower, The Owners need to squeeze harder to extract said profits. This has been going for a few decades now, but for the general public, the 'balloon went up' with the Crash of '09, which was the direct result of The Big Squeeze. Wall Street et al created a Housing Bubble of insane proportions via all manner of shady and even illegal marketing and accounting games.

When the shit hit the fan, they got their political lackeys to use Tax Payer Money to 'reimburse' them for their loses and left said Tax Payers out to dry. Roughly 40% of the American Middle Class Wealth was lost. FORTY PERCENT. That meant eroded tax bases, gutted pension funds, wrecked state and municipal bond portfolios.

That is what Obama inherited. And, being the Corporatist he is, he bunted economically. The perfect example is the ACA [which originated with The Heritage Foundation, a very right wing think tank]. He'd promised a Public Option over and over and over again on the campaign trail. Withing a month of his Inauguration, it had vanished, forcing thirty million Americans into the clutches of the Insurance Industry. [see The Big Squeeze]

Eight years later, after more and more of that kind of betrayal from the Democrats and the insane slavering obstructionism of the GOP, the American Electorate had come to hate the establishments of both parties. And two Insurgent candidates emerged from outside of each party; Bernie and The Donald.

We all know what happened. The 'undisciplined' Dems suddenly became Very Disciplined and sandbagged Bernie. And the infamously disciplined GOP fielded a slate of total buffoons and got its clock cleaned.

Even then, Hillary should have won. She did in fact 'win' The Vote. But her ground game sucked so badly [arrogance], and the Dems had alienated so much of their own base [more arrogance], she lost four states by roughly 120K votes in total.

And that boys and girls, is how Collapse works. The System becomes so rotten that a Black Swan like The Donald can end up in the White House. Now The Deep State has to game The System [delegitimatizing it even more] in order to fix the problem and do a reset, eg a Pence White House, which while ugly, will at least be relatively stable.

But we are still in Late Stage Capitalism and Collapse is still underway and no one has any real idea what to do about that ...except, of course, More Of The Same, which is a well known definition of insanity.

Toss the now inevitable Catastrophic Climate Change into the mix and one can be certain that the next century or so is going to be 'very interesting times' indeed.

You can kill yourself now if you wish....

Current Mood: pessimistic

~Essentially, what is happening to us is that the Bursting of The Housing Bubble has finally caught up with us. The shape of that outcome we'll likely know in a few hours.

That is all...

Current Mood: okay

“Oddly, I spent last night at a party talking to a young woman from China who believes that her country is on the brink of major civil unrest” Laurie Penny Tweeted this a few days ago. I Tweeted back that I'd been saying this for more than a year now and getting dismissed. I then resolved to say something about what I call The Three Chinas Paradigm.

The Old Men in Beijing would like the world to think that China is nearly all Mandarin speaking Han. But of course China is a vast and complex nation-state with dozens of languages and ethnicities. Such should be obvious. Even the United Kingdom, which could be shoehorned into the US state of California, is similar with Welsh and Scottish nationalism and an English spoken in Yorkshire that is nearly incomprehensible to many other English speakers.

So to say there are Three Chinas should be understood as a socio-economic simplification, albeit a useful one in my opinion.

The First China these days is The East Coast, what I call the Go-Go China. That is that China we all know, the one that has seemed bound for World Domination, the Capitalist Roader China that produces cheap goods by the megaton, is packed wall to wall with new millionaires and has funded America's wars for the last decade.

The Second China is what I call The Middle Kingdom, the China of The Ten Thousand Villages. This is actually the real China, the one that has existed for millennia. Most Chinese live in this China. They provide the work force for The East Coast. They are poor and both they and their land are increasingly exploited and polluted. This is also where 'destabilizing unrest' begins in China.

The Third China, which is not really Chinese at all, is The West, Sinkiang and Tibet. Sinkiang is largely [and sparsely] populated by Turkic Muslims. Tibet is of course Tibetan. Beijing has been waging an ethnic war on both provinces for a half century, transplanting Mandarin speaking Han by the hundreds of thousands. For Beijing, Sinkiang is Strategic, both as a buffer state against Russia and as a road into Central Asia. Tibet is even more crucial as it is the principal watershed of East Asia. These provinces are actively hostile.

One can easily see that this is a volatile mixture. Absolute Control is absolutely essential. Of course such is also impossible. Sooner or later Control slips. I suspect this is what keeps the Old Men in Beijing up at night...and the quote at the top is just one more indication that it is slipping faster.

With the Global Economic Downturn deepening, the overseas markets that The East Coast has come to depend upon are shrinking and the work force from The Middle Kingdom are be sent home in droves. Sent home to poverty, poisoned land and endemic official corruption. And the authorities on The East Coast are ruthless about 'clearing out' unemployed workers. Each worker shipped back is another drop in a growing pool of anger, a pool that is becoming a lake, and may even become an ocean. More and more signs of that anger are being reported every day.

Remember that in China 'civil unrest' is something of a euphemism. We'd call it rebellion or even Civil War. And keep in mind that a serious civil war in the People's Republic of China is quite likely to involve the use of nuclear weapons.

This is not simple schadenfreude on my part. We too have come to depend upon China and if the above comes to pass - as I believe it will - these events will ripple economically here as well, such as the loss of those cheap consumer goods which are helping keep many America families [barely] afloat. And the consequences of that will then ripple throughout our society and then back to China.

Interesting Times indeed...

Current Mood: contemplative

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The Divine Mr. M

Neb's Bottomless Rage

Nebs Does Doom

Debating w/ Grad Students

Nebs Does Doom

Lawfare

The Three Chinas

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